Suetonius

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

Suetonius In full Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. fl. second century A.D. Roman historian whose major work, Lives of the Caesars, is an account of the lives of the first 12 Roman emperors.

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Examples

Caesar's military campaigns are known in detail from his own written Commentaries (Commentarii), and many details of his life are recorded by later historians such as Suetonius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio.

The saint was originally a British noble, by name Suetonius; and Dempster drops a letter from his name, and with much ingenuity makes him collateral ancestor of a Scottish family -- 'The Setons, tall and proud.' [

Writing in the second century AD, the biographer Suetonius employed the word luxuria to characterize the degenerate behavior of Emperor Nero, whose habits he said included traveling with a thousand carriages pulled by mules shod with silver, and entertaining in his wildly extravagant palace, which he had overlaid with gold and fitted with pipes to spray perfume on his guests.

Suetonius wrote a single sentence on the affair, which Racine translates as: "Titus, who passionately loved Berenice and who was widely thought to have promised to marry her, sent her from Rome, in spite of himself and in spite of herself, in the early days of his empire."

He notes that he looked "to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius," in the hope of emulating the best of each: "the clear-sightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius without his weakness; Nero's taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian's thrift, but not his absurd miserliness."